Product description

The nature of William Blake's genius is most completely expressed in his Illuminated Books. As poet/artist Blake invented a method of printing that enabled him to create works in which words and images combine to form pages uniquely rich in content and beautiful in form. It is only through the pages as originally conceived and published by the poet himself that Blake's meaning can be fully experienced. Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now some 400 plates, drawn from the William Blake Trust's acclaimed six-volume Collected Edition, and reproduced under their supervision, provide for the first time ever in one volume what the London Review of Books hailed as 'sumptuous facsimiles...glorious coloured pages...like peeping into a furnace of light through a crack in the door'.

Author information

David Bindman is a noted Blake scholar.

Editorial reviews

Blake was not just a poet; nor was he just a book publisher. He was also an artist who developed a unique method of etching in relief so that text and illustration could be mixed on the page. Each book of his poetry was unique, illustrated with his brilliantly distinctive pictures, varying slightly in colour, page order, and sometimes even text. The processes were laborious but the results magical, and in this collection of the complete texts, the reproductions do real justice to the beauty of the original pages. For any Blake fans, at last this is an affordable way to own high-quality reproductions of his beautiful illustrations, and to see his poems in the contexts he placed them. (Kirkus UK)

Table of contents

Jerusalem; songs of innocence and experience; all religions are one; there is no natural religion; the book of Thel; the marriage of heaven and hell; visions of the daughters of Albion; America a prophecy; Europe a prophecy; song of Los; Milton a poem; the ghost of Abel; on Homer's poetry and on Virgil; Laocoon; the first book of Urien; the book of Ahania; the book of Los.